The ugly Sunderland clock which hasn't even worked for 30 years

Oh that any among them was more adjacent to the city’s railway station.

The station has long been regarded as the jewel in the city’s crown, or something, and it’s about to become even better when the current multi-million pound redevelopment is completed. Topper.

However, the super-duperness of the enterprise could be undermined somewhat when the first thing visitors clap eyes on at street level is the perfectly hideous clock dial above a bookies in Athenaeum Street.

The clock was put there in around 1990, when the building below opened as the Alliance and Leicester Building Society.

To the best of our knowledge it has never worked; even when it was brand new.

Like me, it has two faces. The installers must have been ardent admirers of one minute past one, as the Waterloo Place clockface has never suggested any other time for as long as it has glowered at Blandford Street.

Still, they say a broken clock is at least correct twice a day. But the Athenaeum Street face fails to achieve even that.

Its hour hand points infinitely to eight. But the minute hand must have become disenchanted with its lot in life at some point, thereby departing to seek its fortune elsewhere.

Despite having the largest faces of any clock in Sunderland, about seven feet in diameter, it somehow manages to be hidden in plain sight.

It is seldom referred to. People are by now perhaps visually immune to this scruffy, purposeless eyesore. Maybe it’s just me.

The Echo understands that the building it grimaces above, and presumably the clock itself, are owned by a Guernsey-registered property company.

If they would like to get in touch, we can put them in contact with several reputable and interested scrap metal dealers.

Perhaps the owners feel that the permanently defunct timepiece is just too beautiful to kill; although the possibility remains a remote one.

Please divest us of this motionless blot.